Paul Klee Quotes about Art

A drawing is simply a line going for a walk.

Art does not reflect what is seen, rather it makes the hidden visible.

Art doesn't reflect what we see; it makes us see.

Art should be like a holiday: something to give a man the opportunity to see things differently and to change his point of view.

One eye sees, the other feels.

A line is a dot that went for a walk.

I paint in order not to cry.

Color possesses me. I don't have to pursue it. It will possess me always, I know it. That is the meaning of this happy hour: Color and I are one. I am a painter.

All art is a memory of age-old things, dark things, whose fragments live on in the artist.

Art does not reproduce the visible; it makes visible.

The more horrible this world (as today, for instance), the more abstract our art, whereas a happy world brings forth an art of the here and now.

The painter should not paint what he sees, but what will be seen.

There is plenty of room left for exact experiment in art, and the gate has been opened for some time. What had been accomplished in music by the end of the eighteenth century has only begun in the fine arts. Mathematics and physics have given us a clue in the form of rules to be strictly observed or departed from, as the case may be. Here salutary discipline is come to grips first of all with the function of forms, and not with form as the final result … in this way we learn how to look beyond the surface and get to the root of things.

He has found his style, when he cannot do otherwise.

Drawing is the art of taking a line for a walk.

The worst state of affairs is when science begins to concern itself with art.

The art of mastering life is the prerequisite for all further forms of expression, whether they are paintings, sculptures, tragedies, or musical compositions.

Art makes something a lot more visible or audible.

Spatial art does not begin with a poetic mood or idea, but with construction of one or more figures, with the harmonizing of several colors and tones, or with the devaluation of spatial relationships and so on.

The beautiful, which is perhaps inseparable from art, is not after all tied to the subject, but to the pictorial representation. In this way and in no other does art overcome the ugly without avoiding it.

Kunst gibt nicht das Sichtbare wieder, sondern macht sichtbar. Art does not reproduce the visible; rather it makes visible.

First of all, the art of living; then as my ideal profession, poetry and philosophy, and as my real profession, plastic arts; in the last resort, for lack of income, illustrations.

Color and I are one. I am a painter.

The Biblical story of the creation is an excellent parable of movement. The work of art, too, is above all a process of creation, it is never experienced as a mere product.

The creation of a work of art must of necessity, as a result of entering into the specific dimensions of pictorial art, be accompanied by distortion of the natural form. For, therein is nature reborn.